Thanks for the thought. I am a theater person myself, and have talked with other theater folk about the issue. Draw is always an issue. My sense is that Eliot's plays have a smug "I know the secret to life" feel to them, which is alienating and, in my view, paradoxically unchristian--a link to his Puritan heritage. Here's a 1950 review by of the The Cocktail Party, by William Barrett from the Partisan Review, which Jewel Brooker includes in her Contemporary Reviews book, which nails some of it, in my view. Barrett is referring to the 2 choices of life offered in The Cocktail Party (2 choices represented by the Chamberlaynes, and Celia):

“Here we must remember that Eliot,
the last great product of the Puritan mind, has never shown in his poetry any
real belief in the possibility of human love.The moment of love is presented always as the moment of
withdrawal and renunciation, the awful daring of a moment’s surrender, one of
‘the things that other people have desired’; and consequently the beauty of the
world is never present in the fullness of joy, but always with that painful
clutch at the heart as at something taken away, lost, uncapturable.No doubt, resignation is necessary to
get through life at all, and Freud himself stated that the aim of analytic
therapy was to enable the neurotic to bear the sufferings inevitable in human
life; but this is only half the picture, for the work of the analyst may also
be to liberate the patient for the positive joys that life can hold, even
perhaps for the possibility of love, and if the neurotic were told that he is
to be resigned only for resignation’s sakes, it is very unlikely that he would
have the strength to go on.

“I was surprised to read that one
critic found in the play the gaiety that Stendhal recommends for all art, for
it seems to me that at bottom the world of The Cocktail Party is the same empty
world of Prufrock, except that 37 years ago Eliot did not disguise his contempt
for this emptiness.So I feel at
the heart of this play some immense tricherie [cheating], or at least
self-deception, for I can’t believe that Eliot takes the Chamberlaynes as
serious as he pretends to.Here
again, comparison with Sweeney Agonistes becomes instructive, for in this
earlier fragment Eliot fully realized all his hatred of human life and really enjoyed
himself in the raucous company of Doris, Sweeney, Klipsteins, and Krumpacker—in
comparison with whose vulgar vitality the characters at the cocktail party are
genteel skeletons.As a writer Eliot
has never really given us God’s plenty: the qualities of his genius are not
robustness and richness, but precision, terseness, and intensity; and the
shadow which haunts these qualities is a certain tendency to thinness and
brittleness that here in The Cocktail Party has at last caught up with him.”

I would think you could learn more about that from theater people than TSE enthusiasts. You might want to ask some theater faculty or directors.

My guess is that they are not only rather outdated for contemporary audiences but are in verse. I imagine directors would doubt that they would draw. That's only a guess based on what is produced.

Best,

Nancy

>>> John Angell Grant 11/07/11 12:48 PM >>>

I'm writing a Master's Thesis on Eliot's 4 drawing room plays (Family Reunion, Cocktail Party, Confidential Clerk, Elder Statesman). Does anyone have thoughts about why they are rarely performed these days. I set up Google Alerts for all 4 a few months back, and only one production popped up, and that wa 6 rehearsed staged readings of The Cocktail Party by the English-language theater in Abu Dhabi! Donmar did a series a few years back. And there was an NYC production a year or so back.